Home Buyers Find Road to Savings

Skyrocketing home prices in Santa Barbara over the last four years have pushed hundreds of buyers across the border--into western Ventura County.

Realtors in Ventura, Oxnard, Camarillo and Ojai estimate that up to 25% of their clients fall into one of two camps. Some are Santa Barbara residents who sold high but want to stay in the area and come to Ventura County looking for a deal. Others are newly arrived employees at Santa Barbara-area companies who can’t touch the market there and are willing to commute 30 miles or more.

These new county residents range from young couples and growing families to retirees. The homes they are buying range from $250,000 bungalows in Ventura’s midtown to $700,000 ocean-view homes in the foothills.

“If you’ve got just a regular job, you can’t live in Santa Barbara,” said Oxnard-based agent Gale Wergeland. “If you’ve been living there for 20 years, you look around and you can free up that equity and get a bigger, nicer place anywhere you want.”

Ventura broker Fred Evans said he uses that pitch to lure many homeowners out of Santa Barbara. “In Ventura, for $500,000 you can get a three-bedroom, two-bath, 2,000-square-foot house with an ocean view,” he said. “In Santa Barbara, you can just get a tract house in a normal area.”

Compared with other areas in the nation, Ventura County is no bargain. Its median home price climbed 44% over the last four years to about $300,000 and could hit $463,000 by 2005, according to the UC Santa Barbara Economic Forecast Project. Only one in three families countywide can afford to buy a house in Ventura County.

Compare that to what has happened in southern Santa Barbara County since 1996, when the post-recession economy began to pick up.

The already-high median home price in that area, which stretches from Carpinteria to Gaviota, shot up 87% in four years, to $572,000. Today, fewer than one in five people can afford a home, according to the California Assn. of Realtors. That isn’t as bad as San Francisco but comparable to Napa or Sonoma.

Former Santa Barbara resident Bert Walker, a retired tile shop owner, dreamed of buying an RV and hitting the road.

Three years ago Walker, 77, and his wife Dee, 75, sold their stucco duplex for $506,000. That was more than twice what they had paid for it in the 1980s and significantly more than it was worth, as far as they were concerned.

After several months on the road, though, Dee was bored and missed her friends. The couple headed back to Santa Barbara. They set up camp in the Elks Club parking lot in their old hometown and began a search that quickly proved futile: They couldn’t afford to buy back in.

They have since settled in Oxnard. The city’s reputation was more blue-collar, but $247,000 bought them a sizable house in a gated golf-course community. “We live on the 10th fairway,” Bert Walker said. “The view is great. The neighbors are wonderful.”

Sheryl and Doug Peller, a couple in their 40s, bought a house near the Walkers after Doug, a manager at Raytheon, was transferred to Goleta from the company’s El Segundo office.

“We went to Santa Barbara and looked up there,” Doug Peller recalled. “It’s a beautiful city, but I don’t think it’s worth the price. For a 40-year-old house, 1,800 square feet, they wanted $425,000 and up. Basically, we thought it was too expensive. We just couldn’t get very much for what we had to pay.”

Employers say the only out-of-area hires that seem unfazed by Santa Barbara’s prices now tend to come from West Los Angeles or Silicon Valley.

“Whenever I bring anyone out, I don’t even show them Santa Barbara anymore because it scares them away,” said Monetta Williams, vice president of human resources at Helix Medical in Carpinteria. “I primarily show them Ventura or I show them Camarillo.”

Williams sold her own 1,100-square-foot home in Santa Barbara two years ago. She wanted more room for her family. For about $10,000 more, she bought a new 2,500-square-foot house in Camarillo.

A large portion of job growth in Santa Barbara has been through employers, like Helix, in the technology and medical devices sectors. Many tech positions are considered high-paying. But in Santa Barbara, high-paying is a relative concept, said Gary Kravetz, chief executive of Santa Barbara Staffing, which places employees at area firms.

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Kravetz said the average annual salary among the tech executives he recruits is about $70,000--not enough to buy a home in Santa Barbara unless they have a lot of equity from their last home or another large source of money.

“Some of our businesses in Carpinteria are telling us that 50% of their employees are commuting from Ventura County,” Kravetz said.

All this is either good or bad news for Ventura County residents, depending on whether they are trying to get into the housing market or are watching their own property appreciate in value.

“The Santa Barbara prices have caused our home prices to go up in double-digit numbers this year,” said Evans, the broker.

“It’s probably the No. 1 reason our prices have gone up.”